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The Challenge of Christmas

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 06:00:00 -0500

This article is part of our 2023 year-end campaign series, featuring reflections from prominent authors on why First Things matters. To make your year-end campaign gift now, visit firstthings.com/donate.

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1619 Rightly Understood

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 00:00:00 -0400

African Founders:
How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals
by david hackett fischer
simon & schuster, 960 pages, $40

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The Claims of Memory

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 -0500

I write in defense of memory. Not Memory in her gaudy mythological form, the Titan goddess Mnemosyne, mother of the nine Muses—but memory as the glue that holds our lives together and imposes order and continuity amid the blooming buzzing confusion of sensations, thoughts, and activities that stream in upon our days. It is no exaggeration to say that a working memory is indispensable in the flourishing of the human person and of human culture.

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Tucker Carlson, Class Traitor

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 06:00:00 -0500

The Long Slide: Thirty Years in American Journalism
by tucker carlson
threshold editions, 288 pages, $28

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Of Statues and Symbolic Murder

Fri, 26 Jun 2020 12:30:00 -0400

In our culture, we have gotten so used to the idea that “iconoclasm” is a good and admirable thing, a vigorous rethinking of hoary pieties and staid traditions, that we have forgotten the horror and waste of what the word really signifies. We are now in the process of being reminded. Iconoclasm is nearly always associated with moments of religious or quasi-religious conflict, when profoundly different convictions and sensibilities come into conflict and understandings of the sacred become locked in a vicious combat to the death.

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Hebraism Redoubled

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0500

The blow to Christian egos may not be such a bad thing. Christians, particularly those in the West who are heirs to many centuries of political and cultural dominance, must learn to contend with shrinking influence and growing marginalization, even vilification, where they once enjoyed a high, even dominant, status. But the general cultural decline it betokens is a far more serious matter. So contends Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, and some of the most powerful parts of his lecture, particularly in the final third or so of his text, testify to the depth of his conviction.

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Liberalism After Liberalism

Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Liberalism After Liberalism” is one of three addresses given to a symposium on “After Liberalism,” put on in late February with the support of the Simon/Hertog Fund for Policy Analysis and of Fieldstead and Company. Yuval Levin and James Rogers responded to this paper. The other two addresses and the responses will appear in the June/July and August/September issues.

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The Desert’s Austere Grace

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

It is not the kind of road you ever want to find yourself driving on in a hard rain or at night—or, if you are seriously acrophobic, at any time at all. To get to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, you must drive about an hour north of Santa Fe, past the tiny town of Abiquiu and the places where Georgia O’Keeffe did so much of her New Mexican painting. Then you turn off the highway and head west into the Chama Canyon, creeping along for an hour or more on a rough dirt road, heavily rutted in places, extremely treacherous in bad weather, with hard turns and hair-raising drop-offs along the way.

Finally, the canyon narrows, and you begin to see impressive multicolored rock formations rising on both sides, lining the riverbed like rows of mute onlookers. Soon you can make out in the distance the monastery’s adobe tower, peering out like a periscope at the severe landscape around it. The building’s tawny earth tones make it seem entirely natural, at one with the craggy and vaguely threatening cliffs that loom behind it. It blends so fully with its surroundings that it shares in their primeval quality and offers itself as a place entirely set apart from the mundane present. As monasteries go, Christ in the Desert is very new, having been founded in 1964, but it has a sense of antiquity about it. It is an antiquity of nature and myth rather than history.

The longer you are there, as I was this summer, the more the rocky cliffs come to feel like ancient sentinels, brooding presences from a past inconceivably remote yet somehow also still living. You can imagine them as the gigantic remains of defeated primordial deities and demigods of old, like the brutal Titans of Greek mythology, semi-beings that have passed several eternities watching and waiting, with stony impassivity and geological patience, for the eon to come round when they will take things back from us, the clever upstarts, and return them to the way they once were. Or perhaps they could be taken for the remnants of Amerindian cultures that have had their time in the Chama Canyon and then moved on, leaving few traces of their former presence.

In any event, the monks at Christ in the Desert cannot help but be reminded that there are always rival metaphysics on offer in the world, and rival spirits all around them. So too have I been reminded, every time I have stayed at this deeply impressive place.

Why has the desert always played such a key role in the great religious narratives and traditions? Why have holy men and women of all persuasions been drawn to test themselves against extreme habitats and sought the peculiar peace and exhilaration—“the solace of fierce landscapes,” as Belden C. Lane has put it—that come of living in them? Partly because a rigorous landscape forces one to simplify radically and to strip away extraneous desires, all the way down to the core. Its impersonal brutality also inoculates against any easy romanticism, teaching one not to trust in the seeming benevolence and reciprocity of nature or in anything earthly that could ever mediate between one’s frail and insignificant self and the overwhelming transcendence of God.

The desert’s enormous power overwhelms all petty egotism, since no one could ever be so deluded as to think he could prevail against it alone. It releases one from captivity to a sense of self-importance. But perhaps the most easily grasped rationale for going to the desert is the same as that for fasting: In denying the body its customary comforts, one gains access to interior riches that might otherwise be invisible or undeveloped. By denying the body, one releases the soul.

The setting of Christ in the Desert also faithfully mirrors the real human condition, as Christians understand it, precisely because the desert cannot be a permanent home for human beings. It is at best an impermanent habitation, and often serves as a place of trial and intense tribulation, as in Jesus’ forty days of temptation in the wilderness, or in the spiritual battles of the Desert Fathers of the fourth century, who were in turn so great an influence upon the Rule of St. Benedict, which today orders the monastic life at Christ in the Desert in ways both profoundly spiritual and shrewdly practical.

As such, the desert embodies the pilgrim nature of Christian life: One makes the best of a hard and fallen world but puts ultimate faith in the restored and redeemed kingdom yet to come. That perhaps explains why the visitor to Christ in the Desert experiences such a powerful sense of its being a community that is waiting . As Thomas Merton wrote after a visit to Christ in the Desert, “The tower is like a watchman looking for something or someone of whom it does not speak.”

And yet the community of forty Benedictine monks at Christ in the Desert does speak of it—or rather, they sing of it, continuously in and through the entire Book of Psalms and other elements of their daily offices. They have, like those before them, come from all over the world to look for that something and someone together and to make consecrated lives amidst the peculiar solitudes and beauties of this desert. Founded in 1964 by a visionary Benedictine named Fr. Aelred Wall, who had been headmaster of Portsmouth Priory School but felt called to a more contemplative life, the monastery was intended as a place of order in a strife-ridden time, a place where one could “return to the sources” and live a radically simplified life of prayer, study, and work.

Still, there was something audacious about founding such an institution in such a challenging setting, at a time of diminishing vocations and cultural upheaval, not to mention the uncertainties being fostered by the then-ongoing Second Vatican Council. When I first visited Christ in the Desert in the late 1970s, there appeared to be only five monks in residence. Thinking in the manner that Protestant outsiders sometimes do in overestimating the solidity of Catholic institutions, I assumed that such monasteries could never lose the ecclesiastical equivalent of the mandate of heaven. It was only much later that I found out that the monastery had been struggling badly at that time and at numerous moments seemed very likely to go under.

I first came there as a vaguely seeking agnostic, drawn to this exotic place for reasons I could not possibly have explained at the time, but that seem providentially obvious in retrospect. Christ in the Desert has always had an appeal for people like that, curious seekers of various persuasions who perhaps are not able, or willing, to meet Christ anyplace else. I well remember the gruffness and suspicion with which I was received on that first visit by the monastery’s guest master, who clearly viewed me as just another drifter.

The singing of the offices was far from expert, and was accompanied only by a simple, battered classical guitar played languidly by an extremely young Latino monk whom I remember as a dead ringer for the painter Caravaggio. The beautiful chapel was unadorned except for a rude peasant crucifix and the benches on which we all sat.

Yet the large windows of the sanctuary made the light itself into a dynamic aspect of the space, and during moments of silent contemplation I looked out onto cliffs whose color and mood shifted with each passing hour. And the focus and determination of the monks seemed clear and undaunted. The spirit of the place was so powerful to me that I hardly noticed the ragtag qualities at its edges, and cared even less, for I was too busy inhabiting the archetypal.

The spirit of the monastery was not always pleasant. The silence and remoteness of the monks sometimes felt intimidating, and even cold. There was no electricity, only feeble oil lamps, so at night the darkness and silence were profound, profound enough to be disturbing, particularly when the quiet of the night would be shattered suddenly and violently by the cries of coyotes, often surprisingly close by. Staying in the monastery’s minimal guest housing, one experienced the terror and power of the coming of the night, in just the way most of humanity through most of the human past has experienced it. It was a vivid and enduring reminder of who and what we really are, in all our pathetic frailty.

Today, Christ in the Desert still lives by grace on the figurative manna that comes to it day by day. The rigors of the climate and landscape mean that it needs constant and expensive maintenance, and even the most rugged pickup truck is likely to last no more than three years. But the monastery has grown steadily in the past three decades, and its survival no longer seems to be at risk. Despite the continuing general decline in religious vocations, there is today a large waiting list of young men wishing to enter.

And the monks have shown great energy and enterprise in supporting themselves, as St. Benedict had insisted that they must, first by selling arts and crafts and CDs of their (now excellent) chanting and, more recently, by brewing for sale a Belgian-style ale and a wheat beer, named Monks’ Ale and Monks’ Wit. They live “off the grid,” generating power sufficient to their needs with what is the state’s largest array of privately owned photovoltaic equipment.

Yet all these endeavors are of secondary importance, meant to underwrite and serve the pursuit of lives tightly structured along the lines of Benedict’s Rule, divided between times of chanted common prayer in the daily offices, times of private prayer and study, and times of manual labor. For all the seeming stillness, the monks actually live extremely busy lives.

Visitors are encouraged to share in the offices and also in the work as well as the common meals, but there is a clear sense of separation, a cordon that keeps guests out of the monks’ space. For their part, the monks seem barely aware of the guests, except when an enthusiastic visitor sings too loudly during the offices or forgetfully wears shorts into the sanctuary (as I once did), either of which transgression is likely to earn him a sweet but emphatic reprimand from the guest master. Visitors must keep silence after the manner of the monks, something many seem to find very difficult. But perhaps the hardest thing of all for visitors is the increasingly rare sense of being cut off from the world, with no telephones, no cell-phone reception, no Internet, and no easy line of retreat, particularly when night falls and the difficult road becomes impassable.

Yet these difficulties are at the core of what the monastic life is and what it is for, and they are a source of the unaccustomed freedom one can experience living, if only as a temporary guest, that life. For with the strange and inhospitable magnificence of the setting in which they have taken root, Christ in the Desert and its inhabitants teach what it means to overcome the world.

Wilfred M. McClay is the SunTrust Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a member of the First Things ’ advisory council.

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The Living City

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Works of social criticism often do not wear well, and even the best of them tend to fade in interest by their fiftieth birthday. Either the tools of analysis change, or the conditions being analyzed, and very often both. Once-essential works become strictly historical documents, artifacts giving some insight into the world of their own time, but with little or nothing to say about ours.

William H. Whyte’s 1956 The Organization Man , for example, provides some insight into the corporations of its own time, but not into corporate environments it could never have anticipated, such as today’s flat organizational structures, with their fluid job descriptions, telecommuting, extensive outsourcing, and the like. Indeed, its enduring importance may lie less in its empirical accuracy than in the summum malum it was taken to describe, the horror of conformism—the silent justification for that diamond-stud piercing or subtle tattoo or pony-tail by which today’s businessman or professor tries to reassure himself that he is still a man born to be wild.

Likewise, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) was important and influential in its day, but today’s reader is more likely to notice such eccentricities as an astonishing chapter arguing that the postwar suburban home was “a comfortable concentration camp” that aimed at the “progressive dehumanization” of women. More generally, one is likely to be struck by the extent to which the book addresses itself to a world of male–female relations and childrearing that has been, for better or worse, consigned to the past, as vanished as the code of chivalry—although preserved in Freidan’s book as (like Whyte’s conformism) a summum malum ever to be guarded against.

The two books are more cited than read. The same cannot be said, however, of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities , a 1961 book that still enjoys a large and devoted following after fifty years, because its readers find it just as rich and stimulating now as when it was published, and because it addresses itself to problems that are still very much with us. Jacobs stuck an audacious thumb in the eyes of arrogant top-down planners, clueless modern architects, and ignorant bureaucrats, and offered a vote of confidence in the superior power of spontaneous order, which for her meant the ability of ordinary people to fashion a satisfying form of urban life without the “help” of the accredited experts.

Her book was refreshingly un-abstract and densely empirical, built upon an accumulation of lovingly rendered details about what works and doesn’t work in modern city life. Despite the withering contempt of experts and allies alike—even the architectural critic Lewis Mumford, letting his unfortunate susceptibility to vanity get the better of him, could not resist dismissing Death and Life as a “preposterous mass of historic misinformation and contemporary misinterpretation” assembled by “a sloppy novice”—this unaccredited journalist-mother, with no college education, no training in planning, and no institutional support, wrote a book that would change the way the world thinks about cities.

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The Enduring Irving Kristol

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

I cannot claim to have known the late Irving Kristol very well. But each encounter was memorable, and none more so than the last, in May of 2009. It was at a crowded and noisy reception at the Warner Theater, prior to Leon Kass’ presentation of the annual Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Irving’s health had been gradually declining for a long time, and he was by then wheelchair-bound and sitting on the sidelines. But he would not have missed the occasion of his close friend’s important lecture and clearly was enjoying himself, even though he was nearly deaf.

He seemed to accept such symptoms of physical decline with remarkable equanimity, even humor. As his son Bill relates in his lovely foreword to The Neoconservative Persuasion, a posthumous selection of his essays, when Irving would lunch with his colleagues Irwin Stelzer and Charles Krauthammer, sometimes at the end of one of their debates he would advise them, “I can’t hear what you’re saying. So I make it up. And,” he added, smiling, “sometimes you disappoint me.”

I knew conversation with him on this occasion would not be easy and might end up disappointing us both. Still, I had a feeling the opportunity might never come again, and so I presumptuously knelt down at his side and spoke directly into his ear. He didn’t seem to mind in the least.

My question was as follows. Here we were now, four months into the Obama administration, far enough to see pretty clearly where the new president and his large congressional majorities intended to take the country: among other things, toward a greatly enlarged public sector with vastly expanded regulatory and administrative roles for the federal government in industry, energy production, education, banking, environmental protection, medical care, trade, and virtually every other important aspect of the economy.

For those of us who had lived through the tumults and frustrations of the seventies, a heyday of ineffective governance and economic torpor, such a litany of top-down, command-economy measures seemed like a return of the repressed, as if all the vital lessons of those dreadful years were being cast aside in favor of a mindless embrace of hoary statist delusions that had already amply proven their inadequacy. How, I wondered, did Irving feel about this development? Were we in fact going backward? Would we have to relearn the same lessons all over again?

“Of course we will!” he exclaimed without hesitation, smiling as ever, eyes flashing. “The younger generation never learns much from the past.” A pause, and then a more direct gaze. “But you hope it learns eventually.” And it struck me both then and now how perfectly these simple words distilled his outlook on life: skeptical, realistic, historically aware, unillusioned, and yet, despite it all, hopeful. I heard no hint of condemnation in his words, since he was speaking of all younger generations, very much including his own. He was stating a fact about the human condition, not hurling moral thunderbolts of disdain or prophetic admonition, and he spoke with a rueful smile, not a bitter snarl or sighing resignation or—least of all—anything remotely resembling despair.

He had long ago concluded that it was pointless to expect people to be better than they were and then to be angrily disappointed in them for failing to meet unrealistic expectations. He believed in the sobering and restraining importance of experience, both as a residuum of hard-won traditional knowledge and as the ultimate proving ground for the new and untested. And yet, notwithstanding his skepticism and his sense of life’s contingency, there also was an irrepressible buoyancy about him, a kind of animal vitality born of hopefulness that kept him in motion and engaged and curious. It impressed me that he said “we” will. He did not speak as if he were checking out any time soon. But he did imply rather strongly that the task facing us was going to be one of general moral renewal and not merely one of winning political battles.

All of these qualities of mind and character come shining through in The Neoconservative Persuasion, a collection of Kristol’s essays ranging across sixty-four years, most of them previously unpublished in book form, ranging from his early contributions to a forgotten magazine called Enquiry: A Journal of Independent Radical Thought to his valedictory words at the close of the career of his most important enterprise, the journal called The Public Interest. The range of subjects and authors he takes under consideration in these essays is staggering, from Tacitus to W. H. Auden, from supply-side economic theory to Jewish theology, from obscenity to the future of NATO, from Machiavelli to welfare reform.

Most astonishing of all is the high degree of pertinence that so many of these essays have for the present moment, despite the occasional or impermanent circumstances for which they were originally composed. Very few of them seem dated, and then only in very incidental and unimportant ways. They seem to have matured rather than aged.

This collection is welcome for another reason. Irving Kristol the writer has been consistently underestimated, and in two different ways. First, because he is often seen as more important for the institutions he built than for the things he wrote. He may well have seen himself in that same way, having concluded at the start of his career that all the most important innovations in modern intellectual history had come out of small, intently focused groups: circles, schools, salons, sects, metaphysical clubs, and the like. He realized that the task before him, which could be described as the defense of liberal society against its own excesses, would require the creation of something similar, an incubator and testing ground for the ideas that would become neoconservatism: a label for the distinctive intellectual “persuasion” that he will always be identified with.

“I decided that I wanted to create a salon,” he once told me, and that was just what he did. All the magazines he edited, most notably The Public Interest, and all the institutions he helped sustain, most notably the American Enterprise Institute, were that salon, an archipelago of gathering places where those who were like-minded, but not too like-minded, could have fruitful conversations and exchanges leading to enlivened inquiry and intellectual breakthroughs. It is not entirely surprising that emphasis on his achievements as an intellectual place maker should crowd out consideration of his own writing.

Kristol’s writings have been underestimated also because he was a man of ideas who had the ability to write simply, directly, and pithily about them. He had an uncanny ability to cut through the incidentals and accidentals of a matter, go right to its center of gravity, and grasp hold of it in clean, epigrammatic phrases. This is a rare and remarkable gift and yet one that is almost guaranteed to produce detractors in the world of ideas. He did not suffer from the academic’s addiction to parades of ever greater levels of complexity or to making arguments from authority while using jargon and willfully opaque verbiage. He weighed issues with great care and had a phenomenal ability to read and absorb and distill a wide range of often highly technical writing. But in the end, what he wrote was, like his words at the Warner Theater, often disarmingly direct, presented without qualifications or escape clauses, so much so that he often fooled those who confuse erudition with wisdom.

In addition, The Neoconservative Persuasion provides an excellent reminder, very badly needed, of the essential core of neoconservatism, a “persuasion” that has become so widely misunderstood, and sometimes willfully so, that a return to the original sources seems long overdue. Many on both the right and the left now dismiss it breezily as if it were nothing more than a crusading and neocolonial ideological commitment to the universal imposition of liberal democracy, particularly in the Middle East, heedless of the imperatives of culture and history. But for Irving Kristol, who in any event wrote mainly about domestic matters, it was always a vastly more complicated and nuanced thing.

In the beginning, he saw it not as a root-and-branch repudiation of liberalism in all its aspects but as a corrective to the destructive effects of liberalism run amok, an outlook that presumed the fundamental sobriety and humane good sense of a very moderate and culturally conservative form of liberalism. A neoconservative was, in the famous formulation, a liberal who had been “mugged by reality”—something that purer conservatives could not (and would not be likely to) claim for themselves. When Kristol and the late Daniel Bell started The Public Interest in 1965, they did so in reaction to the effects of bad political and social-scientific ideas that were taking their turn in the saddle of American political and intellectual life, such as the sentimentalization of poverty or the sensationalized fear of “automation.” But the project quickly grew beyond its origins. By the seventies, many of the overblown hopes of the postwar era, and particularly of the sixties, had come crashing down, in the form of chronic economic stagnation, swelling welfare rolls, endemic urban crime, and, on a deeper level even than these admittedly serious problems, a general loss of confidence in the American way of life and the American future, in the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate. The steady increase in these pathologies, the ever expanding list of America’s economic, diplomatic, cultural, and spiritual woes, became The Public Interest ’s bread-and-butter subject.

But The Public Interest and the neoconservatism it embodied were not merely a means of saving liberalism from itself, even if that motive contributed a great deal to their founding energies. They were also a modernizing and enlivening contribution to newly emerging, and as yet intellectually spotty and politically ineffectual, American conservatism, showing it how one might employ the tools and vocabularies of the social sciences to make conservative perspectives on social policy more widely persuasive. Both neoconservatives and traditional conservatives might deplore the ill effects of exploding rates of illegitimacy and single-parent families, facilitated by vastly misguided social policies; but it made a huge difference whether the opposition was expressed strictly in abstract philosophical or theological terms or in concrete and quantitative form, carefully correlating causes and effects, substituting numbers for impressions and statistics for anecdotes. In addition, neoconservatism, particularly as Irving Kristol practiced it, concerned itself with “the relation of our religious-moral traditions to the secular-rationalist culture that has been imposed upon them,” a concern that one sees consistently expressed over the entire span of Kristol’s long and productive writing career, beginning with his essays in the 1940s on subjects such as Auden, Ignazio Silone, and “the myth of the supra-human Jew.”

Kristol did not see himself as writing for the ages, and neither did he see neoconservatism as a permanent addition to the intellectual firmament. Instead, he saw it as a passing and generational phenomenon, claiming in his essay “An Autobiographical Memoir” (1995) that neoconservatism had by then been “pretty much absorbed into a larger, more comprehensive conservatism,” no longer warranting identification as something separate and distinct. He may or may not have been right about this. There may be a case to be made for the continuing distinctiveness of the neoconservative persuasion, which rests far more comfortably in the lap of modernity than does the older conservatism, being more accepting (for example) of the principle of equality, or of the mild regulation of the market economy, and accepting, if only because they have become “facts on the ground,” the necessity for many reforms (such as Social Security) that traditionalist conservatives had routinely anathematized. As one familiar formulation has it, neoconservatism accepts the New Deal but rejects the Great Society—or, to put it more precisely, it insists on pointing out the latter’s unintended but inevitable consequences. Neoconservatism could have been a much-needed Dutch uncle—a Jewish Dutch uncle—to American liberalism. But too many liberals insisted, and still insist, on seeing those two reform movements as sequential expressions of the same thing, and insist on judging social policies by their benign intent rather than their lamentable effects. Neoconservatism’s merger with conservatism may seem inevitable, but it really wasn’t.

In any event, one must remember that it was in the shadow of events eerily similar in many ways to those of our own times that neoconservatism took shape, both in Irving Kristol’s imagination and as a movement to counter and correct the collapse of national morale and to introduce sober second thoughts about the inherent limitations of the liberal-progressive project. Such reconsiderations led to a keen awareness of the limits of social policy, the failures of consolidated national-scale command economies, and the hubris and folly entailed in the progressive movement’s embrace of a rationally engineered national society governed by accredited experts. Neoconservatism exposed the futility of social initiatives that consistently failed to take account of the needs and flaws of human nature, failed to acknowledge the wisdom of traditional and customary forms, and failed to acknowledge the need for strong and independent mediating institutions”families, churches, neighborhood organizations, wards, townships, and other organizations of every shape and size”to provide a firm basis for vibrant community life and for the cultivation of civic virtues. In the realms of social welfare and criminal justice, liberalism failed to set forth a realistic structure of incentives and sanctions that addressed human nature as it really exists and that could thereby make the practice of “ordered liberty” something more than an empty slogan.

Neoconservatism was a key expression of this chastened intellectual mood, and the essays in this volume are both trenchant and prescient in that regard. “What we call[ed] the ‘neoconservative’ impulse,” Kristol wrote in 1978, was “a disillusionment with, and disengagement from,” the kind of massive, national-scale social reforms that treat human beings as social aggregates rather than as individuals with souls and motivations. The creation of a welfare state that had set aside those realities had brought much unnecessary pain and social dysfunction on every level of human life. “By now it is obvious to all who wish to see,” Kristol argued later in “The Welfare State’s Spiritual Crisis,” “that we are experiencing a profound crisis of the welfare state”—and then he went on to provide an absolutely spot-on analysis of the various crises: financial, social, and, “the deepest crisis of all,” spiritual, a crisis arising out of “the way the souls of the citizenry are formed and shaped by the welfare state,” and ending in an undermining of “the legitimacy of the state itself.”

Such an essay was drawing out the specific implications of the deeper political realities Kristol had already masterfully depicted in his essay “Republican Virtue versus Servile Institutions” (1974), in which he argued that the former could not possibly survive the establishment of the latter. “That it is possible to corrupt a citizenry—or for a citizenry to corrupt itself—is something the Founders understood,” wrote Kristol, “but which we seem to have forgotten.” Such words disclosed a concern with the moral implications of the ways we choose to be governed. One of the chief ways we risk corrupting our institutions and ourselves is by allowing our institutions to become “servile”—that is, completely unable to make significant moral demands on the public they serve. This is fatal to republican self-governance, because republicanism cannot exist without a strong normative dimension, without an ideal of human excellence to which we seek to conform ourselves in the process of self-governing. Without a normative moral conception of the self, there can be no self-government and no full and genuine human flourishing.

Kristol saw this specter looming in the increasingly influential “democratic dogma” that “the very idea of helping people to shape themselves in a certain way is both presumptuous and superfluous,” a view that eventuates in making us “diminished persons.” Then he went on to add the following:

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